Sri Lankan authorities arrested a senior Buddhist monk on Saturday for the alleged sexual abuse of an underage girl, police said, marking the highest-profile case involving clergy in the country.<\/p>\n
Pallegama Hemarathana, 71, was arrested at a private hospital in the capital Colombo, where he had sought treatment over the weekend amid an investigation into the alleged abuse of the 11-year-old girl in 2022.<\/p>\n
The crime is alleged to have taken place at a highly venerated temple in Anuradhapura, around 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of Colombo, where Hemarathana is the chief priest.<\/p>\n
“We will be guided by the magistrate on further action,” a police statement said Saturday.<\/p>\n
The monk will soon be presented before a judge.<\/p>\n
Authorities added that the victim\u00b4s mother has also been arrested for aiding and abetting the monk.<\/p>\n
The development comes a day after a local court in Anuradhapura imposed a foreign travel ban on the monk.<\/p>\n
There have been several cases of clergy abusing children in Sri Lanka, but the latest arrest involves the most senior monk to be accused of such a crime.<\/p>\n
The 71-year-old is the chief custodian of a tree believed to have been grown from a sapling of the Bodhi tree in India that sheltered the Buddha when he attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago.<\/p>\n
He is also the chief of eight highly venerated temples that are on a key Buddhist pilgrimage route.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sri Lankan authorities arrested a senior Buddhist monk on Saturday for the alleged sexual abuse of an underage girl, police said, marking the highest-profile case involving clergy in the country. Pallegama Hemarathana, 71, was arrested at a private hospital in the capital Colombo, where he had sought treatment over the weekend amid an investigation into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,144],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3555,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553\/revisions\/3555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}